Here comes the sun: Cornell hopes to expand its renewable energy portfolio as it benefits from the NY-Sun Initiative, a series of large-scale, solar energy projects expected to add about 67 megawatts of solar ...

Don't throw away those bouncing batteries. Researchers at Princeton University have found that the common test of bouncing a household battery to learn if it is dead or not is not actually an effective way ...

In the first study of its kind, scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) quantitatively show that electric vehicles (EVs) will meet the daily travel needs ...

User comments : 6

As a long-suffering NY taxpayer, I decry the waste of my tax monies to subsidize private companies. This is nothing more than crony capitalism, giving taxpayers monies to favored companies, who no doubt give a substantial amount of it back to the Governor's re-election campaign.

1.6 MW peak rating from 4670 panels is 336W per panel. Assuming the standard 4x6 ft panels (wow, 17% efficiency – really). At $300 per panel, that's $1.428M and 2.62 acre (2.5 football fields) for the panels. At $2500 per sq ft (year 2000 prices) for NYC land, that's $286M. OK, you can rent un-shaded roof space from your brother-in-law for $10M a year. But you still need structural support ($10K), equipment ($25K) and installation ($50K). Plus you need a place to store the 8592 kwh energy (see below) for a day ($273K plus more space and hazard for the batteries). OK, you can dump the storage problem on the utility company by back-metering into their grid. It will only cost them half that per year in equipment and inefficiency costs ($137K per year). If you amortize the initial cost over 5 years and add in the costs per year, you get your power for $10.54M / year.

How much power do you get? The panels are un-gimbaled, mounted flat, and NYC is at 45 deg latitude and gets 100 days of full, 125 days of partial, and 230 days of some sunshine a year. So that's 8592 KWH/day on a perfect day, half that on an average NYC day (1563744 kwh/yr).

We get a cost of $6.55 per kwh. At my house I pay $0.12 per kwh (residential/non-industrial rate, delivered, taxed, and available when I need it). This is why Europe is abandoning green energy in favor of affordable energy. To Brigitte Dusseau, this is an "energy boom". To an engineer, it is a joke.

Here is a few numbers for you guys. 2 - 1.1 GW nuclear power plants - are going to cost $14 billion. http://www.greent...30-years Financed by yours truly the U.S. taxpayer. Wonder if that one upsets Richtheengineer. Now granted - NY only gets an average of 3-4 hrs of sun per day - http://www.bigfro...Day.html But even at thatThe solar is still a bargain - delivering power at about 1/2 the cost - especially considering the operating cost of a nuke is considerably higher - and hey - no spent fuel to dispose of.

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